by Robyn Walker-Spencer of Bowdoin College
The sun rises on a quiet campsite, cool mist swirling around a full rainbow of tents as gray light trickles in over the horizon. Before long the fauna of Camping Aquasol make their voices heard, softly at first with the flutter of wings and the calls of chilean swallows and southern house wrens, then loudly and with abandon as the rooster makes its presence known. With this, the people inside the tents begin to stir. We hear a small cacophony of zippers as people rise, opening their tents and facing the day. One by one, students of Round River stumble their way towards the quincho, our little shelter, clutching toothbrushes and trying not to trip on the guy lines that adorn the tents of their peers. Inside the quincho there is a flurry of activity as the group prepares for the day, an unchoreographed but elegant dance as they jostle for space at the stove to cook breakfast, brush their teeth at the sink, or finish a reading over coffee at a quiet corner of the table.
Today is a free day, as rare as they come. Our triumphant return from the snow-camping dog-hugging huemul-surveying mountain-climbing adventure that was the Campesino Project (see Ruby and Maddy’s blogs!) has left us happy but exhausted, and we are all ready for a break. And even though in Chile our free time is gold, I stay in my tent a good hour longer than usual, enjoying the slow morning and the coziness of my sleeping bag. There’s frost on my tent this morning, one of the increasingly frequent reminders that fall has arrived. I wait in my tent until I can hear voices and soft music coming from the quincho. It was a cold night, but the sun is shining, and my dear friends have gathered around a tree-stump/table to eat banana pancakes and scrambled eggs (prepared by Kate, lovingly referred to as chef). It’s like this that the day begins—no rush, just laughing and taking in the sunshine.
After breakfast, we gather in the quincho to make a meal plan for the next three days. The learning curve of cooking for ten people every night was steep— “We’re out of bread already?!”— but at this point in the semester it has become second nature. We quickly come up with the essentials: sixty eggs, thirty breads, more butter, as much fruit as the shoppers can carry. Maddy runs up to the bodega, our storage space/giant pantry/trip planning space, to see what staples we might be low on. We have nearly exhausted our thirty-kilogram supply of rice from the beginning of the semester, and we make a note to replenish on this grocery run as well. Each dinner team (three groups of two or three people) decides on the meal they will prepare for the next three nights, and we send the list to the instructor team for a run to town later today. Eggplant and chickpea sandwiches for Sunday, stuffed peppers for Monday, and pad thai for Tuesday. We relish the time at basecamp to plan elaborate dinners, to eat good food that we could never make while backpacking, to spend hours in the kitchen in a combined cooking/dance party.
As much time as our little group spends together, we take the next hours to be solitary, whatever that might mean for each person. Our last camping trip lasted five days, and a shocking amount of dirty clothes can accumulate in that time. I bring my bag of filth to the river and do my best to scrub the stench from the small amount of clothing I brought to Chile. Doing river laundry can be effective only up to a point, but still the ritual has a peacefulness to it. I didn’t expect a campsite to ever feel like home but seeing everyone’s clotheslines strung across the trees that surround our camp has an aspect of domesticity that feels kind of beautiful.
When we first arrived to Camping Aquasol, which Round River students have called home (basecamp) for over a decade, patagonian summer was in full swing. Even though the river that winds its way through our campsite is fed by a glacial lake, the summer temperatures meant that the icy, clear water of the river was exactly the break we needed. At the beginning of the semester I was swimming in the river at least two times a day, sometimes even in a ten-minute break between classes. Now that it is autumn, though, the freezing water is less tempting. Round River students aren’t considered adventurous for nothing, though, and the afternoon sunshine meant that some of us braved the glacial waters. Peter and I have spent the semester scheming to swim the length of the river from one end of the camp to the other, and we have just decided that today is our day. We don swim goggles that we found in a dusty box in the bodega and wade into the frigid water. Immediately we regret waiting until this point in the semester to begin our adventure—the water is the clearest we’ve ever seen; we can see every pebble and aquatic plant—and immediately our faces and limbs ache from the cold. We hurry out of the river after only a minute, lingering only to catch the last glimpses of a whole world left unexplored. Our dip (because it really wasn’t more than a dip) left us exhilarated and grinning but still wanting to go back. In our conservation biology class at the beginning of the semester we talked about the importance of ecosystems as provisioning services, and swimming in the river today makes me feel a deeper connection to the river at Aquasol. I appreciate its beauty and as a lovely swim spot but knowing that it is our source of water makes it feel that much more important. I take comfort in finally seeing the species that lie beneath the surface, knowing that they too rely on the river as their everything.
The rest of the day passes peacefully, a fairly typical day. We cross paths, we chat; we cook food, we share plates. Chaos ensues (as always) as we have an impromptu dance party over dinner prep. We all have work to do but instead spend a lazy hour after dinner talking and laughing.
At the beginning of the semester, Eve had explained to us how she sums up her days. “Life is surreal,” or “life is a journey,” on a particularly tough day. As has become our habit, we ask, “Eve, what is life today?” Tonight, though, I can answer for her. “Life is a dream.”
